In the name of these values, some academics have justified atrocities by developing distorted social theories. They have crafted a version of Marxist theory positing that the world is dichotomously divided between oppressors and the oppressed, and then created a fake history in which the world’s most persecuted people are magically transformed into the world’s most noxious oppressors. They view Zionism as representing a white (false), colonialist (false), oppressive (false) movement against the native populations, when Jews are by any sane definition—buttressed by thousands of years of written and material history—the aboriginal population of the land.

Yet the purpose of these arguments is hardly to debate history, but rather to license terrorist violence against civilians. Consider renowned feminist scholar Judith Butler, who also serves as a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In a shocking display of moral equivalence, following the Oct. 7 massacre, Butler questioned why Hamas should not be called an “armed resistance movement“ instead of a terrorist organization. In 2006, she claimed “Hamas and Hezbollah should be understood as progressive social movements that are part of the global left,” after Hezbollah’s then-leader, Hassan Nasrallah, decreed in 2003 that gay individuals should face execution, claiming “they pose the primary threat to Lebanon.” More recently, in April 2024, the IDF unveiled documents detailing Hamas’ brutal treatment of gay people, including executions and torture-based interrogations. These practices implicated even high-ranking Hamas officials.

Views like Butler’s, representative of a prevalent intellectual current in Western academia, reached their public zenith during a hearing in the U.S. Congress in December 2023. The presidents of America’s leading universities—Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT—were questioned about antisemitism on campuses and the alarming calls for genocide and politicide emanating on campus. Harvard’s president contended that such statements fall under “the university’s commitment to freedom of expression.” UPenn’s president asserted that classifying these calls as bullying or violence “depends on their context.” MIT’s president argued that genocidal calls violate university policy only if directed at individuals, not as general statements.

For nearly five hours, these academic leaders maneuvered, clumsily, around the explicit condemnation of calls for violence and genocide against the Jewish people. This moral paralysis was particularly glaring in comparison to their typically resolute stances on other moral issues in the sociopolitical sphere. It is impossible to imagine the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT spending hours justifying the legality of mass demonstrations on their campuses calling for the mass extermination of African Americans or gay and lesbian people. Apparently it was understood within leading Western academic institutions that Jews are considered oppressors even when they are being beheaded, raped, and burned alive.

Such responses engendered a profound sense of betrayal among Jewish academics worldwide. They also affected brilliant Jewish students worldwide who had comprised a significant percentage of these universities’ student bodies and now found themselves compelled to confront the rising tide of antisemitism within their alma maters—even as they were increasingly being pushed to the institutional margins, and seeing their numbers steadily reduced in what appears to be a campaign of active discrimination against Jews as “white.” Disgusted by what they were seeing, numerous Jewish alumni ceased donations to these elite institutions and resigned from their governing boards.

These events triggered a profound identity crisis for many Jews who had integrated into diaspora societies, even at the highest levels. They experienced a jarring estrangement from their former associates, once viewed as exemplars of morality and integrity. This shift compelled them to reexamine their cosmopolitan identity and their social group affiliation, challenging long-held assumptions about their place in Western intellectual circles.

Nor can Jews reasonably look to “international institutions” such as the press, international bodies, and courts, to repair the injustices they suffer in their home countries.

While Israelis are used to biased coverage, the comprehensive moral failure the international media has exhibited in its selective coverage and glaring omissions has been shocking. There are no more pretenses: the international media has overtly abandoned objective reporting and has failed to present Israel’s position fairly to the global public.

The United Nations is even worse. On Oct. 27, 2023, the U.N. General Assembly condemned Israel and called for an “immediate and sustained” humanitarian cease-fire and a “cessation of hostilities” by an overwhelming majority of 121 nations. This resolution conspicuously omitted Hamas’ atrocities and disregarded the ongoing rocket barrage from Gaza into Israel concurrent with its issuance.

A fortnight after the attack, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres posited: “The attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation … Those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people … The relentless bombardment of Gaza by Israeli forces, the level of civilian casualties … are deeply alarming.” This proclamation implicitly legitimized Hamas’ atrocities while drawing a specious moral equivalence between the aggressors and Israel’s defensive actions, which try to minimize civilian casualties.

Then there’s the ICJ and ICC: South Africa and other nations appealed to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), alleging genocide in the Gaza Strip—a charge with zero basis in reality.

Additionally, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has requested arrest warrants for Israeli and Palestinian leaders for war crimes, equating the leaders of a terrorist organization with those of a state defending itself against them. This equivalence is drawn while Israel strives to avoid harming innocent civilians with a success rate that exceeds that of any Western army in any urban war. Similarly, the prosecutor’s allegation that Israel carried out a policy of “starvation of civilians” is a demonstrable falsehood.

These accusations against Israel again received backing from most of the international community, which expressed confidence in the objectivity of the courts’ decisions.

One of the most striking revelations since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack is the systematic use of rape and sexual violence as a military strategy. This was confirmed by multiple sources including survivor testimonies, rescuer reports, Hamas videos, and captured terrorists.

The conspicuous silence of human rights and women’s rights groups regarding these atrocities, juxtaposed with their focus on the situation in Gaza, has intensified among the Israeli public the sense of betrayal by the international community, which otherwise purports to be concerned with issues like violence against women.

On Oct. 13, UN Women issued a statement that read: “UN Women condemns the attacks on civilians in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and is deeply alarmed by the devastating impact on civilians including women and girls.” This statement omitted any reference to the rapes or the abducted women. A week later, the organization published a second statement on “the devastating impact of the crisis in Gaza on women and girls,” again ignoring the crimes committed against Israeli women. The message—both to Israelis and the wider Jewish world, as well as to those who rejoice at the images of Israelis being murdered, raped, and traumatized—are entirely clear. Jews simply don’t count. Raping and murdering them is fine.

The sense of betrayal has been particularly painful for Israeli human rights activists who have worked closely with similar organizations worldwide. Professor Ruth Halperin-Kadari, head of the Rackman Center for the Advancement of Women’s Status, who formerly served as vice chair of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), articulated this sentiment eloquently last November. She noted that when similar crimes against women and children were committed by ISIS against Yazidi women, or in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bosnia, Rwanda, there was a standard response from the United Nations. “What we went through on October 7 … the scale, the fact that it was part of a war plan, the extent of the atrocities—it’s more egregious than ISIS. As a dedicated defender and fervent believer in international law and the UN’s role in protecting human rights, I feel betrayed.”

In a saner world, one that adheres to previously accepted international norms, these international institutions would have ruled to arrest Hamas leaders, who, implementing their movement’s charter which calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, began to carry out genocide for nearly half a day. They would have brought to justice Hamas terrorists who use civilians in Gaza as human shields and operate from hospitals, schools, U.N. shelters, mosques, and churches. Moreover, they would have condemned and ended all support to the movement’s educators who have instilled generations with hatred for Israel. Instead, the terrorists were given employment at U.N. agencies and U.N.-run schools.

In the real world, Israel stands alone.

The surge of antisemitism and the political alienation of the State of Israel, as reviewed above, have been a wake-up call to Israelis and Jews alike to return to the core principles of Zionism:

1. We must rely on independent Jewish defensive capabilities for our national security.

2. We cannot escape the Jewish association. Individual fate is inextricably linked with the broader Jewish nation.

The events of Oct. 7 and the ensuing war have vividly illustrated and revalidated the relevance of the Zionist idea, that the Jewish condition cannot rely on the world’s goodwill in times of crisis. We cannot expect democratic nations to stand with the only democratic state in the Middle East. And we must recognize, now more than ever, the state’s crucial role in Jewish life.

Despite the Oct. 7 attack and the unleashing of antisemitism, Israel has given the Jewish people the ability to fight back. Today, we are no longer helpless nor are we a people at the mercy of foreign rulers. We are fighting, and we are winning. This moment of our isolation as a nation and as a people is also one of the greatest moments of pride and strength in our history.

This is the essence of political Zionism, starkly revealed on Oct. 7: In the face of terror, the soldiers of the Jewish state regained their composure and fought back. Not since the days of Bar Kochba has there been such a potent Jewish response to existential threats.

For 12 months, Israel has resolutely repelled those who seek its destruction, writing a new chapter, distinct from the chronicles of Jewish persecution. With our own hands we have now destroyed the entire leadership of Hezbollah, the largest terrorist organization on the planet. The Iran-sponsored organization had, over four decades, murdered hundreds of Americans and kidnapped foreigners, violated the sovereignty of nations near and far by committing large-scale atrocities and setting off bombs, with very few repercussions. Meanwhile, the world stood by mute. Now, it is Hezbollah’s leaders who are mute.

Our adversaries make no distinction among Jews; the Oct. 7 atrocities transcended all sectors and was rooted in pure antisemitism. Recordings of the interrogations released by the Shin Bet revealed that the central motive of the attackers was that the victims were Jewish.

The perpetrators made no mention of their targets’ sectoral affiliations—whether they were settlers or kibbutz members, religious or secular, conservatives or progressives. Non-Jewish individuals, too, were condemned to death, their fate sealed by the perception of their complicity with the Jewish populace. Echoing the ethos of Nazi Germany, our enemies view us as a monolithic entity destined for annihilation, whether justified through theological doctrine or pseudo-scientific racial theories or postcolonial academic-political gibberish.

The hope that becoming a “normal people,” as author A.B. Yehoshua posited, by integrating into global culture or adopting a cosmopolitan worldview, would lead to acceptance and support from the “enlightened world” has proved illusory. The historical lesson we must derive from Oct. 7 and the international community’s subsequent response is that we must not be complacent, neither in the military sphere nor in the realm of consciousness, regarding the world’s attitude toward the Jewish people and the State of Israel. If our enemies declare that in their heart, mind, and plans they aspire to annihilate us—we must not trivialize, mock, or doubt them. We must take their aspirations seriously, treat their words with the utmost gravity and believe them, and act accordingly.

In closing, we must confront the following questions: Is it conceivable that there is global animosity toward Israel without factual foundation? Is it plausible that the international community is erroneous, while our stance alone is righteous?

The question is entirely absurd, as can be seen from our own history. Is it plausible that slavery was righteous, and only the Jewish people had a law that required that slaves be set free? Is the Earth flat? Was the rest of the world right when they sacrificed their own children to idols? Do Jews in fact bake their Passover matzo with the blood of gentile children? No.

What the rest of the world does and wants can never be our yardstick. Otherwise, we’d all be dead. Jews need to trust in the lessons of our own history, and in each other. If we can do that, we will write a new and even more glorious chapter in the long history of our people.